


Come Away

by Hlessi



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Cultural References, Gen, Guilt, Kink Meme, Language Appropriation, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 16:39:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hlessi/pseuds/Hlessi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Such a creature as he had become had nothing and no one left to live for, and no place to call home. But Mouse was too much of a coward to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Away

**Author's Note:**

> Response to [this prompt](http://hobbit-kink.livejournal.com/8478.html?thread=18067998#t18067998) over at the Hobbit Kink Meme.

Mouse was helping Wulla dig up her garden for the spring planting when she told him.

“There's a King Under the Mountain again, they say.” Wulla sat back on her heels. The front of her smock was dirty where she'd been kneeling in the soil, and she left a smear on her forehead when she wiped the sweat away with her sleeve. The dirt was black against her skin, as black as her hair. “Crowned in his stone seat by a seer.”

“Wizard,” said Mouse without thinking. He could feel Wulla looking at him as he sifted the damp loam with the shard of broken pot that he was using for a trowel.

“Wizard,” repeated Wulla. Her low, sleek voice made a ripple of the word. “Wiz- _ard_.”

They dug awhile, breaking apart clumps of packed soil and pulling weeds to make room for seeds. The bleak day was warming with the Sun and there was a sweet gurgle of water from the stream that nudged up almost against the stone wall that separated the garden from the moor. The smell was of smoking peat from the house and flowering heath, and there was a drone of bees from the hives that Wulla kept on the other side of the turf roof. Mouse was nearly asleep, his hands working on their own.

“The King Under the Mountain is looking for something, they say,” came Wulla's voice. It was indistinct, as if she had not lifted her head to speak. “Something called a _halfling_.”

The Northmen had no word for what Wulla had heard. What she really said was _halbamann_ , half-man. But Mouse knew what she meant.

“Said it was a little thing, this _halfling_.” Wulla's trowel thumped. “Half a man's height, smaller even than a _Dwerya_.”

Mouse had stopped digging. He sat there on his knees.

“Fram says that there is silver for the one who tells the King where the half-man is.” Wulla sighed through her nose. She'd stopped digging as well. “And gold for the one who brings him.”

Mouse looked up.

Wulla was looking at him. She'd put her trowel down at her knee, and was resting one of her hands on top of a thigh. Her other hand was pressed absently to her belly, where it had begun to swell.

Her grey eyes were imploring. “Fram says there is no worry,” she said. “Our neighbors are far, and the village small. No one comes here. If they did, still we would say nothing.”

Mouse shook his head.

 _“Musi,”_ said Wulla, but there she stopped, and simply looked at him with those pleading eyes. She was younger than she appeared, Mouse had to remind himself, much younger than her careworn face and her workworn hands would suggest. That was the way with these people, these Northrons, whose lives were as grinding as the weather in this cold country.

 _The more reason,_ he reminded himself, and he took a deep, chilly breath to steady himself before he spoke. “You ought to take the silver, Wulla. Or tell Fram to take it.”

Consternation tightened her mouth. “But you will go.”

“I'd get you the gold if I could, Wulla,” said Mouse, “but I'm afraid I'm too much of a coward.”

Wulla frowned, and he could see her lips moving as she repeated the phrase to herself, trying to work it out. She spoke unusually good Common, especially for this part of the world, but certain idioms still confused her.

“If you had the silver,” added Mouse, “you could buy a big plough, and then the village could farm more land together for a better harvest.”

Wulla stared at him. Mouse could tell that it had never occurred to her that the villagers might farm their fields together rather than apart. Northrons were a self-reliant, independent sort of people, who seemed to only ever come together for feast days, weddings, and fighting. But they were not unthinking, and Wulla herself was known for being a clever woman. He could see her taking hold of the idea, immediately understanding how it would work to everyone's gain.

Yet she shook her head in turn. “We can do this,” she said, “but not with the King's—” she turned her head and spat into the dirt, which made Mouse wince “—silver. Let the _Dwerya_ keep his coin.”

There would be no convincing her, he saw. It moved him. And yet...

“I'm going to the neighbor's,” said Mouse, and stood up.

She put out her hand as if to catch at his sleeve, only to stop herself. “You will come back?”

“Oh, yes,” Mouse assured her, “likely by suppertime.”

Wulla asked nothing more. This was something else he had learned about the Northmen, that he had to always be careful when telling them that he would or would not do something, because whatever he promised they would expect to the letter. It was a curious, and somewhat unnerving, practice that they seemed to apply only to him. Mouse had noticed that they did not expect such exactness from each other.

He stood up, brushed off as much of the dirt as he could, and left Wulla to finish in the garden. He went down to the stream, where he washed his hands and feet, rinsed his face, and then, confident that Wulla was not watching, slipped on his ring.

The nearest neighbor was a man and woman who had five children. Mouse stood at the corner of their turf house and watched the littlest children play clapping and skipping games while their mother sat in the door sewing. The father and the two oldest boys would be in the homefield, he knew, and the oldest girl was sitting with her mother.

Mouse was most pleased by how lively the two youngest were, a boy and a girl. The fever had been awful for them, and he hadn't been at all certain that the herbs he'd left them would do anything but ease their passing. That they recovered so quickly and completely had shocked him as much as anyone else.

He left the four of them where they were, and went around to the back of the house where, on the stoop by the door of the kitchen, he found, alongside his usual bowl of milk, a dripping honeycomb. Mouse shook his head and tutted, because a family with five children had no business leaving him such treats, but he knew from experience that it would only disappoint and embarrass them if he left it. He drank the milk and ate the honeycomb while sitting against the house. The hearth was just on the other side, and the turf was warm against his back.

There were five other houses within sight of Wulla's, and so five more bowls of milk and three wedges of cheese. At each, he would watch the children play, and observe how far along were the women who were with child. There were many more of them than there had been when he'd first come. _It has to be the greens,_ he thought to himself.

He was getting lazy, it seemed. At the fourth house, one of the children came out of the house on an errand just as he was setting down the empty bowl, and upon seeing that the milk was gone the boy immediately shouted _“Musi,”_ which brought the other two rushing out after him. They ran around the kitchen garden, arms outstretched and hands groping, calling hopefully, _Musi, Musi_ , while their mother peeked out from the door, her expression just as eager. He should never have shown himself to that little girl when she'd tripped and skinned her knee. Now all the faunts wanted a look.

At the fifth house, a low turf house set into the side of a hill that looked so painfully familiar to Mouse but for its pointed roof and squared door, two of the women, the married daughter and the widowed mother, were talking together as they spun and watched the babes playing in the grass. He did not know enough of their tongue to follow their speech, but certain words were clear enough to his ear. _Thiudans. Dwerya. Halbamann. Silubr. Gulth._

Wulla said that none of them would talk, but Mouse had seen enough of gold in his life to know how it had a language of its own. He couldn't blame them. They were so poor here, their children always only one bad harvest or hard winter away from a slow death. With gold they could buy seed and good iron and sturdy beasts that would give them milk and meat. If they were cunning, and some of these Northmen could be very cunning, they could trade on the favor they could get for him from the _Dwerya thiudans_ to perhaps become more than a little village of turf houses. Perhaps they could even leave here, this patch of barely-tamed land in the middle of nowhere, and go North. If someone promised them good land. If someone promised them gold.

 _They'd be fools not to take it._ Few of these people could read or write, but they had their stories, their songs. He'd listened to enough of them, sitting by himself in the dark, to know that they had once been horsemen, a great tribe of heroes who had lived and fought all along the River Running. Then one fine afternoon the most of them had ridden off into the South, some of them had married into larger tribes in the East, a few had gone upriver to become Dale-folk, and what was left had withered on the branch right here, with the wood on one side and the river on the other, too far from the Old Forest Road to make use of it but close enough to know how pitiful they'd become.

Gold and life, for some strange little creature that drank their milk and ate their honey in return for a few herbs and advice that would be common sense anywhere else. It was more than fair.

Well. Maybe not gold. They would have to get by on silver, because, as he'd told Wulla, he still loved his freedom and his life too much to get them the gold. He was such a coward.

He got back to Wulla's house just as the gloaming whispered out from under the trees and the first stars sparked out of the darkening East. Wulla was at the door, a faceless shape in the firelit doorway, waiting for Fram. Mouse avoided her and went around to the back, where he nosed through the garden until he heard them greeting each other.

While they talked, and Fram had his supper, Mouse peered into the shed where Wulla kept her soap-making implements. More than nearly anything else, he was proud of having brought soap into the East. Even Wulla had balked when he'd first suggested it. _What is soap?_ she'd asked, using the Common word for it, and after he'd done fainting, Mouse had taught her to make a very simple kind of soap out of water and ashes and lavender. Within a fortnight, the entire village had become noticeably cleaner, and sweeter-smelling.

 _Clean people are happy people,_ someone had once told him, _and happy people make babies._ Eating more greens certainly helped. Mouse had taught Wulla how to forage on the moor and in the woods, something he'd been startled indeed to hear they did not know how to do, and Wulla had taught the other wives. Since then, there were rather fewer people with loose teeth and yellow skin, and in the summer there would be babies, just as there should be.

 _At least I'll have been useful to someone,_ he would comfort himself sometimes, especially at night. _At least I'll have done this too, against everything else._

He was sitting on a stone and looking at a tear in his coat's hem when Wulla finally came out. She had a bowl of milk in her hand.

Mouse put his hand in his pocket and rolled off his ring. “Hello, dear,” he said. “Please come sit down, I have to talk to you.”

That made her stop where she was. She looked deeply unhappy, even afraid.

“Please, Wulla.” He sighed, for the second time that day. “It's important.”

She was loath to come, he could see that, could see that she knew well enough what he'd have to say. Still, she put the bowl in his hand and then seated herself in the grass beside him.

The first bowl of milk he'd ever drunk was right here, at the kitchen door of this woman's low house. He'd been staggering with hunger, starving in the snow, for there were no berries in winter, no nuts, no bird's eggs, and not enough roots. Fear of death had made him desperate enough to take off his ring and crawl up to this woman's stoop, prepared to beg, and there he'd seen, to his bewilderment, a small bowl of icy milk.

Now all the houses of this village left out bowls of milk, even the poorest. They left out bread and cheese, and meat sometimes, if it could be spared. It had been a custom with them in the old days, Wulla had told him, and looked at him with such certainty that he knew what she was saying that he didn't have the heart to ask.

“Right, now.” Mouse cleared his throat. “First, I want to talk to you about planting your own herb garden, and what should go in it...”

None of the villagers had their letters, but they had absurdly good memories. Wulla listened, rapt, as Mouse told her everything he knew about herbs and the medicines they made, particularly those that broke fevers in babies and children. When he told her something particularly important, he would stop and ask her to say it back. The night was full and deep when he finished.

“I can't think of anything else right now,” he admitted. “Tomorrow we'll talk about crops.”

Wulla made no answer. Her eyes were on the frayed cuffs of his coat.

This always embarrassed him. He knew that he looked far from presentable, with the wear of road-living on his clothes. His shirt was practically in tatters, and everything needed a wash. Some days he would put on his ring and strip himself naked to wash his clothes in the stream, but there was no helping it. Clothes could only be washed so much. Yet Wulla was always staring at his worn clothes and pursing her lips, and he wished she wouldn't. That little girl he'd picked up after her tumble had called him a _fanamann_ , a rag-man, and this bothered him more than he would have liked.

“Good night, dear,” he said, and handed her back the empty bowl. She took it and, without speaking, went into the house. Wulla had learned not to invite him in.

They passed three days in this manner. During the morning, Mouse would follow Wulla about and help her with her chores, and then he would spend the afternoon going around looking at the children. Here and there he would put his hand to something if he saw some way in which he could be useful, and once he pulled a little boy back by his smock just as he would have tipped over into the stream. At another house, he gave a sour-faced girl who reminded him of somebody a pinch on the arm just as she was being very pert to her mother, but that was more for his own sake.

During the nights he would sit with Wulla, and he would talk to her about farms, and about money, of which he knew more. He told her how to value things, and how to charge by weight and how to charge by count. He explained how to tell if a coin had been clipped, and how not to be cheated at the scales. He advised her to learn her letters, and get Fram to learn them too, for this would be a help to them if they went trading.

On the third night, he told her that a great many things were changing in the North, and that even a small village with no name could get some good of them if they worked hard and were clever. He said that a new kingdom was about to be made, or rather two old ones were about to be raised anew, and that there would be chances for both trade and work there if Wulla and Fram were of a mind. If they did not want to go North, still they might take their goods to market in the North for much more than they could get down here, and if they borrowed their cousin's boat then they could float their surplus—he explained surplus—up the river to the Long Lake, where the Lake-men would buy it from them or they could pay the Lake-men to haul their cargo to Restored Dale and the Mountain by barge.

When he told her this, Wulla said, “It is a fearful thing to leave your home, but we would do it for the child.” She put her hand on her belly. Mouse smiled to see it.

Then she said, “We would do it gladly if we had our luck to go with us.”

Mouse looked away.

Wulla took a long breath. “Fram says the others think the same. We need not go North. We need not stay here. Why should the _Dwerya thiudans_ and his silver drive away our luck? Is he so poor in his halls of stone and rivers of gold that he must have our little happiness as well? Do not go, _Musi_. We will keep you secret. We will keep you safe. We will go away with you if you tell us where. Stay with us and bring us luck.”

Mouse had thought that he had spent all his tears long ago, on things and people who had been lost to him for more than a while. Yet it seemed that was a lie, because his eyes were wet. “Wulla, I can't.”

 _“Musi,”_ said Wulla, her voice pleading.

Mouse took a shuddering breath. “You don't understand, Wulla. I am not luck. I am not happiness. I—” The words caught in his throat. “I am—I am bad. I am a bad thing.”

A low, breathless laugh trickled out of her, a laugh disbelieving. “You?”

It had been much the same the first time he'd revealed himself to her. She'd stood trembling with fear to be spoken to by the air, though she'd answered him stoutly enough, and then he'd taken off his ring because he could not stand the dread in her eyes. They'd gone so round at the sight of him, her mouth had dropped open. Then she'd burst into laughter, not derisive or mean but relieved and delighted. She'd put her hand out to him as if to a child, and this had somehow charmed rather than offended him.

She could not know. She could not know what manner of creature she had offered her hand.

Mouse looked at her, this tall, dark-haired Northron woman, really not much more than a girl. She had been putting on more weight since he'd come, her teeth had stopped bleeding and her skin was clean. There was a new contentment in her face. Or there had been.

She whispered, “Will you take my child with you?”

He almost dropped his bowl. Wulla looked so fearful, sitting there, her hands over the curve of her belly. He remembered that Fram and she had been married for several years, and yearning for a child for all of them.

“No,” he said firmly, “no, of course not, dear. Only eat your greens and drink clean water, and _no more_ bleedings or nasty potions, I don't care what that old gammer says.”

Wulla laughed, and Mouse laughed, and some of the sadness went out of his heart. They must part, but at least he had brought no harm on these good people, these Northmen with their odd customs. He could go away knowing he had done them no ill. If Wulla did as he asked, he might yet even put some silver in their pockets as he went.

It was some time before dawn when Mouse woke to Wulla's voice calling for him. He had wrapped himself in his coat and cloak and lain down to sleep against the turf where it was warm from the fire inside, his ring on his finger. Wulla's voice was ghostly and distant, but it had been enough to pull him from his dreams. Mouse sat up and took off the ring.

 _“Musi.”_ Wulla turned to him. Her hair was loose and uncovered and her face was pale and tear-stained. “ _Musi_ , you must run away. Run away now, before the _Dwerya_ come!”

The knowledge came on him all at once. He knew what had happened by the look on her face, without needing it told to him. He could have laughed. People were people.

“Wilwa sent her son,” whispered Wulla. “It was her husband who told. He went to the town-people, to the river-men. He told the _kindins_ that the half-man was here. She says he left to bring the mountain king's soldiers here in the morning.”

 _Oh, poor blockhead,_ thought Mouse. _If he thinks that chief isn't going to take credit for everything, he's got another thing coming. He'll have upset all his neighbors and his wife and done all the work and he won't see a pence of that silver. I wish he'd talked to Wulla, I would have told him how to do it._

 _“Musi,”_ said Wulla, “give me your coat.”

He took off his cloak and coat and gave them to Wulla, and then he left her to walk away into the night, toward the stream. A short way into the moor there was a large stone, which the villagers avoided because they said it looked like a face. Mouse went to this stone, finding his way by starlight as the Moon had long since set, and he dug under it with his hands.

The rags were not buried deep. He brushed away the dirt and laid the bundle down in the grass. When he pulled away the tatters, the mithril gleamed in the dark.

Wulla was weeping when he returned to her. She was sitting on her stoop where she was accustomed to perch as she listened to him talk, and she was sewing by the light of a burning rush that Fram was holding for her. It was Mouse's coat she was sewing, the tears in the hem and the sleeve.

Mouse had never shown himself to Fram before. When he stepped forward, armor-clad and sword-girt, Fram's mouth hung open. His blue eyes were filled with wonder.

Fram was a good husband. Mouse had seen this for himself. Fram would come home exhausted from the fields, black with soil from feet to shoulders, but when he spied his wife all the lines would smooth out of his face. He would smile so tenderly. He would wind Wulla's hair about his big hand and kiss the exposed arch of her neck. Three babies washed away before they could be born and he'd never resented her, never blamed her. Never stopped loving her. A black-haired, blue-eyed man, hands coarse from toil, his face rough with a beard he never quite finished scraping off.

To see Fram's arm around Wulla's waist made Mouse sick with longing.

Wulla was sewing desperately, the needle moving so that it glittered. She'd stuck herself, and she was bleeding from the finger.

“Wulla,” Mouse called gently, “Wulla, dear, never mind the coat. It's all right.”

She looked up. “Oh,” she cried at the sight of him, “oh!”

Mouse went to her and took the coat out of her hands. He bit the thread, as he'd seen her do, and then he took her bleeding finger and wiped it with a coat sleeve.

This was the first time he had ever touched her.

“Don't you worry, dear,” he said. “Everything will be fine. I'm sorry for the silver, but there's nothing we can do about it now.”

She gaped at him, and Mouse took away his hands. He put on his coat, and then his cloak, a big, heavy cloak that had borne the emblem of a hammer before he'd picked the threads out. Now it was just a faded blue.

Then, dressed and armed, Mouse took Wulla's face in his hands and pressed his lips to her forehead in a kiss.

“You'll be fine,” he murmured. “Your child will be fine. Don't worry.”

He would hope that was the truth. And if it was not, what was one more lie, after everything?

 _“Musi,”_ whimpered Wulla. “ _Musi_ , will you give me your name? I promise I will keep it safe. I swear. Only if I truly need you. Please?”

Mouse sighed. Quietly, sadly.

“I'm sorry, dear,” he said, “but I'm afraid I don't have one anymore.”

He began to take his hands away, but Wulla caught them and kissed them, her cheeks hot against his fingers. Then Fram let the rush fall to the dirt and stepped on it, so that all was dark but for the stars.

Mouse followed the little road trodden into the grass. He went out of the garden, around the house, and down a slope. He put Wulla's house at his back and passed down the path in view of the other houses. He did not put on his ring and so he felt them all watching, their eyes on him, the men and women at their doors, looking at him, seeing him. He could not tell if any of the children were awake.

He passed through the village, in his blue coat and cloak, his mail shining and his sword on its belt. The night was black and cold, the dawn still distant.

Before he could catch himself, Mouse heard a voice singing, _We must away, 'ere break of day_.

The pain of it. The grief. The despair and the loathing. They were all still there, the only estate remaining to him. He had traded all he had for these things, not least his name. Wulla's house and Wulla's village had been a reprieve, a moment of calm, a place to bind his wounds and salve his heart and pretend he was anything but what he was, but he'd known it would not last. He had not gone far enough.

He wondered what would be. What could be. What place, so strange and so far away, might be beyond the long arm of silver and gold and kings.

At the stand of pale birches that marked the boundary of the village, Mouse slipped on his ring.

**Author's Note:**

> The language of the Northmen is just burgled Gothic.


End file.
